A House Built Around The Trees: Casa Corallo by Paz Arquitectura

Designed by Guatemalen architecture firm Paz Arquitectura, Casa Corallo brings nature indoors – quite literally. Located in Guatemala City, this seems far from an urban environment. In fact, it feels so entrenched in its environment that you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it has trees growing through it. Yes, I said through it!

Its location, a hillside forest in the Santa Rosalía area of Guatemala City, the architect, Alejandro Paz didn’t want to disrupt the natural landscape too much and decided that the house would integrate some of the existing trees, allowing them to interact with the living space.

Jaime Derringer, Founder + Executive Editor of Design Milk, is a Jersey girl living the laid back life in SoCal. She dreams of architectural jewelry, running more than 8 miles + having enough free time to enjoy some of her favorite things—running, reading, and drawing.

5 Comments

Zaedrus on 11.12.2012 at 10:00 AM

The topside elevation is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen! Though the bottom side loses some of the appeal with it’s massive scale.

The balanced interior palette of board formed concrete and wood is exquisite! Also, it’s great that every element was treated as a sculptural opportunity.

Dubious of trees. I’ve heard when they’re exposed to conditioned interior space and unconditioned exterior, it screws with the tree and they tend to die. Perhaps this location doesn’t require (much) conditioning?

Dorin on 11.13.2012 at 04:10 AM

This is not an ecological approach – thouse poor trees will be submited to different levels of temperature, humidity,etc. on their columns… And it is not so comfortable also for the inhabitants, because normally on the natural columns live a lot of insects, fungus, etc…
A better solution is to realize open light patios with such trees, so to have like a chess table plan.

Chuck on 08.18.2013 at 07:27 AM

Please…what an unnecessary comment. They could have chopped them down. Would that have been better? They obviously love nature and tried to incorporate it into their lives. There is much room in life for differing solutions to problems.